On the brink: High-ranking Russian military officials peer into an opened intercontinental ballistic missile silo at an undisclosed location in the country in 2001. Recently revealed British documents show that a major 1983 war games exercise was so realistic, it nearly prompted the Soviet Union to launch a nuclear attack on NATO. | AP

Secret documents reveal how close USSR came to launching nukes in ’83

LONDON – Chilling new evidence that Britain and America came close to provoking the Soviet Union into launching a nuclear attack has emerged in former classified documents written at the height of the Cold War.

British government memos and briefing papers released under the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act, which creates a public “right of access” to information held by public authorities, reveal that a major war games exercise, Operation Able Art, conducted in November 1983 by the U.S. and its NATO allies was so realistic it made the Russians believe that a nuclear strike on its territory was a real possibility.

When intelligence filtered back to the British Conservative government on the Russians’ reaction to the exercise, the prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, ordered her officials to lobby the Americans to make sure that such a mistake could never happen again. Anti-nuclear proliferation campaigners have credited the move with changing how the U.K. and the U.S. thought about their relationship with the Soviet Union and beginning a thaw in relations between East and West.

The papers were obtained by Peter Burt, director of the Nuclear Information Service (NIS), an organization that campaigns against atomic proliferation, who said that the documents showed just how risky the Cold War became for both sides.

“These papers document a pivotal moment in modern history — the point at which an alarmed Thatcher government realized that the Cold War had to be brought to an end and began the process of persuading its American allies likewise,” he said.

Able Archer, which involved 40,000 U.S. and NATO troops moving across Western Europe, coordinated by encrypted communications systems, imagined a scenario in which Blue Forces (NATO) defended its allies after Orange Forces (Warsaw Pact countries) had sent troops into Yugoslavia following political unrest. The Orange Forces had quickly followed this up with invasions of Finland, Norway and eventually Greece. As the conflict had intensified, a conventional war had escalated into one involving chemical and nuclear weapons.

Numerous U.K. air bases were used in the exercise, much of which is still shrouded in secrecy. However, last month Paul Dibb, a former director of the Australian Joint Intelligence Organization, suggested that the 1983 exercise posed a more substantial threat than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. “Able Archer could have triggered the ultimate unintended catastrophe, and with prompt nuclear strike capacities on both the U.S. and Soviet sides, orders of magnitude greater than in 1962,” he said.

The exercise took place amid heightened international tension. In September 1983 the Russians had shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 737, killing all 269 passengers on board, after the plane had mistakenly strayed into their airspace. There is evidence to suggest that the Russians thought the Boeing was an American spy plane.

Earlier in the same year, U.S. President Ronald Reagan had made a high-profile speech describing the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” and announced plans to build the “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative. With distrust between the U.S. and USSR at unparalleled levels, both sides were operating on a hair trigger.

As Able Archer commenced, the Kremlin gave instructions for a dozen aircraft in East Germany and Poland to be fitted with nuclear weapons. In addition, around 70 SS-20 missiles were placed on heightened alert, while Soviet submarines carrying nuclear ballistic missiles were sent under the Arctic ice so that they could avoid detection.

NATO and its allies initially thought the Soviet response was the USSR’s own war games. However, the classified documents obtained by the NIS reveal just how close the Russians came to treating the exercise as the prelude for a nuclear strike against them.

A classified British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) report recorded the observation from one official that “we cannot discount the possibility that at least some Soviet officials/officers may have misinterpreted Able Archer 83 and possibly other nuclear CPXs (command post exercises) as posing a real threat.” Much of the intelligence for the briefings to Thatcher, suggesting some in the Kremlin believed that the Able Archer exercise posed a “real threat,” came from Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky.

Formerly classified files reveal Thatcher was so alarmed by the briefings that she ordered her officials to “consider what could be done to remove the danger that, by miscalculating Western intentions, the Soviet Union would overreact.” She ordered her officials to “urgently consider how to approach the Americans on the question of possible Soviet misapprehensions about a surprise NATO attack.”

Formerly secret documents reveal that in response the British Foreign Office and Ministry of Defense drafted a joint paper for discussion with the U.S. that proposed “NATO should inform the Soviet Union on a routine basis of proposed NATO exercise activity involving nuclear play.”

Information from the JIC report and Gordievsky was shared with Reagan, who met the spy and was apparently so swayed that he pushed for a new spirit of detente between the U.S. and USSR.

However, Burt stressed that the end of the Cold War did not mean that the risks had gone away. “Even though the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago, thousands of warheads are still actively deployed by the nuclear-armed states,” Burt said. “We continue to face unacceptably high risks and will continue to do so until we have taken steps to abolish these exceptionally dangerous weapons.”

America now faces a new communist regime. China can and will take down the newly formed (these past thirty years) Corpocracy in the U.S.A. and on the economic battle-field of this world, not on a WWII styled battlefield as the U.S. would wish for and prepares for. At the moment, to save face and to promote the ‘illusion” the Feds print $85 Billions of U.S. Dollars a month – the entire GDP of some small countries, in “Money From Heaven’ , but China recently allowed trading for oil in Yuan on the Shanghai exchange, and lessened its commitment to U.S. paper. U.S. retaliated with Oil deals for Iran: Is this why, the U.S. thrust for Iranian oil at any cost, even weak and pretentious nuclear reasons? Is this why U.S. plays “Good Cop” and Israel plays “Bad Cop’ in extorting Iran for its oil? On threat from Israel of nuclear extinction, without U.S. ‘protection’? (Mobster style?) Under these strange circumstances, can Iran even sell oil to China? In Yuan? Very strange logic here, Nuttinyahoo threatens nukes on Iran’s head, U.S.
offers fiat, “Funny Money” for oil? Ayatollahs nod and smile, nod and smile? Last words on energy: Chinese Thorium?